I used to cheat the credit system by taking mind-blowingly easy exams from management courses (they’re literally all the same) or from business studies (half of them are like maths for dummies). Weird minor courses were extra fun, and sometimes actually interesting to do read a book for.
Zero studying, just sign up for the course if it doesn’t have an attendance requirement, take the test, free credit! Sometimes you could even shape those wildly unrelated courses into a Minor, which I how I have 4 minors on my diploma (1 normal one, 3 Frankenminors I assembled myself out of whatever I had already).
I used to do that with a few friends, and we almost got in trouble once for telling the truth (“no, showing up to class isn’t mandatory and we’re pretty sure we can pass the exam with zero effort”). There were zero rules against this, and the only harm was to the professor’s egos, but I did get several stern talkings to.
One year I only had a single evening course… I used this technique too.
The only downside is the reoccurring nightmares where I forgot to graduate.
My university would keep past exam papers in the library. This was apparently a little known fact, but somehow we discovered it, went and got them and use them as the basis for revision.
Turns out our professors were lazy and used the same exam every year. Does that count as cheating?
If the school provided the material, you didn’t bring anything to the test that you weren’t allowed to, and nobody told you not to utilize the files in the library, then you didn’t cheat
I haven’t. Learning was always easy for me. Pay attention in class, take proper notes and do your homework. I know I’m lucky in that regard. Usually I only checked my notes the night before an exam and went through with it care-free. I only really studied for my math A-levels because it’s not my strongest subject and for my final Spanish exam at the end of my 3-years job training because I could’t care less about the language and thus only ever did the bare minimum learning it.
Once, in school, I saw my teacher had carelessly discarded a printout of the questions for next week’s tests in the classroom’s paper basket.
I grabbed it to take home and study perfectly for those questions, feeling like a secret agent.
Never got around to even look at it before the test, though, and showed up unprepared as ever.
I don’t believe I have ever cheated on an exam or big test, but there were a few cases in college where teachers would leave answers for homework or projects unsecured, and I did make use of it whenever I came across it.
One such case was in an introductory computer science course. We had a weekly lab session where the teaching assistant was giving us an overview of using the Unix systems at the university. At one point early on, he was teaching about file and folder permissions, and gave us all access to his personal folder. And… Then he forgot to lock the permissions back up. His folder was fully accessible for the entire semester, and he posted full solutions to every programming project there.
I remember another course where the professor would send us a link to the solutions to the homework problems, after he finished grading the homework. But I learned that I could just change the URL to access all of the future homework answers.
All the time! I do this thing where, before the test, I look over the subject matter and store the information in my head, letting me breeze through the questions.
In seriousness, no. But I’ve definitely been cheated off of.
Yeah. My D average, undiagnosed ADHD brain wasn’t about to let me make it through high school the conventional route.
same thing.
ADHD makes highschool a nightmare.
if it wasn’t for cheating in tests I would have failed highschool even harder. I did end up failing anyways, the kicker. the hypoerfocus I used to make my cheating utensil ended up being great study. so when I prepared for cheating I ended up doing fine, even if I didn’t use any cheats in the test.
I’m not stupid, and ended up getting a GED (I wasn’t American, but it counted as highschool and it was so much easier to attain, and opened the doors to UNI), got a bachelors, and then a PhD.
I almost kinda involuntarily cheated and almost got flunked out of college. Comp sci major, forced to do a partner programming assignment. Met up with the dude and banged out like 75% of the project in the first meeting. After that, he kept dodging and rescheduling and giving excuses yadda yadda why he couldn’t meet up. Finally, just before the deadline, he says he’ll finish and submit it. I reluctantly agree (mostly because I was over a barrel at this point). The dumbass submitted his buddy’s version from the previous semester and it got flagged as a 99% match. We both had to face an academic dishonesty committee and plea our cases. Thankfully he fessed up (and I showed chat transcripts and screen shots) and he got an F in the class and a suspension of some kind. I think the prof actually kinda took pity on me because I was supposed to get a zero on the assignment, but I was a pretty crappy student anyway and that would’ve tanked my whole grade, so I think she just averaged my grades or something and I got a C+ overall.
I knew of someone who kind of did, depending on which way you look at it. Only for one question though…
He noticed that the answer to a single question, was literally written on his otherwise exam-compliant calculator a few weeks before the exam, for high school math. The question often came up in practice tests. This calculator wasn’t programmable (in the sense you could store answers).
The question?
How many kilometres in a nautical mile? Answer: 1.852.
He figured out that the numbers in the centre row of the calculator lined up exactly with the decimal fraction:
7 8 94 5 61 2 3So he drew a line around the calculator pad to link those numbers up. None of the teachers picked it up, as it looked like graffiti.
That seems like more of a mnemonic than cheating, and isn’t that a bit of a silly question for an exam? Unless it’s asking you to derive how many kilometres in a nautical mile from something, exams shouldn’t be testing rote memory.
I had a professor in college who would do 10 question pop quizzes from time to time. He would always have the answer key stapled to the front of the envelope as he passed them out. I have good spatial recognition and would always crack a joke to him when he got to me just so he’d pause for a second and I could memorize the pattern real quick. I’d fill out the answers in under 30 seconds and just pretend I took it.
🤔 sounds like you had a pretty smart professor if he walked around displaying the answers to his quiz…
Yes. I struggled with Calculus in college and cheated on a few tests with a well hidden index card/cheat sheet.
The irony was that creating this cheat sheet was sort of a form of studying, and I barely needed them come test time.
Was it wrong? Yes. Do I feel bad? Only a little. I don’t need or use anything from that course in my life now so it is kind of inconsequential.
Some times in school I did, and not only do I not regret it at all, I also see it as a necessary life skill.
Many times people are put in deeply unfair situations where the rules are against them to begin with. If you play by the rules you will always lose.
In school I had some teachers who didn’t give a fuck. They were not taking their job or teaching seriously but were still sadistic people taking some form of sick pleasure against students.
In such cases, there is no established framework in these situations where it there was a class with knowledge transfer/teaching, where the student is properly put to a test to verify he indeed adquire such knowledge. You rather have a sick social exercise where a sociopath is in a position of power making student’s life hell and test results are semi random.
In university I also had teachers who only pretended to teach. They would not be there for most of the time of the class or not show up at all, but they still made tests with the material that wasn’t teached and that students didn’t even know about. Of course many would just fail like this.
In these cases I cheated.
Life trows you these situations, and learning how to cheat is rather learning how to save yourself. I never cheated in legitimate situations, as I just didn’t feel I was being treated with injustice, and therefor didn’t even had the need to cheat.
Define “cheating”.
I looked up an online answer key for the last test I took. The test was take-home and open book, and the teacher repeatedly said that we could use ANY resource to complete the test. I spent hours scouring the course material trying to find some of the answers, and they just weren’t there; the course simply didn’t cover some areas of the test at all. Or even mention them. It turned out that there were several version of the course that I took, and the teach taught one version, but used the test for a different version.
Is that “cheating”? I don’t know. I did all the parts that I could without looking online, but I’m still not happy that I needed to look online in order to complete a course ‘successfully’.
Only once.
9th grade physics.
The teacher used an overlay to grade our multiple choice tests, and in a few spots, I’d mark two answers. I got caught, earned my crappy C, and never cheated again.
I hated physics.
nah. i may be a punk but i aced my tests using my own head lol
